An Invention That really transformed our lives

       Google the greatest inventions of our time, say the last 75 years, and you’ll find all sorts of wonderful, important techy stuff. Stuff like the Internet, of course, and the integrated circuit, the smartphone, the MRI scanner, the laser, the personal computer, the Global Positioning System.  

      All great, all important, all have significantly changed the world and our lives. Transformative, all of them. We use them, we depend on them, but of course we have absolutely no idea how they work.

      But what about the more mundane stuff that’s been invented during our lifetime, the simple things, the not-particularly-technical inventions that have simply made our day-to-day existence so much more pleasant?

      I have been thinking about those unsung, simple inventions of the last 75 years, and there are a lot of them that I have really appreciated. Stuff like Post-it Notes and the bagless vacuum cleaner and the food processor and Velcro and, yes, the everything bagel (invented in the early 1980s by a Queens, NY, baker at Charlie’s Bagels who said he noticed fallen seeds from other bagels and decided to put them on a plain bagel. Cream cheese would never be the same!).

      All wonderful additions to our daily lives, if not necessarily transformational. But there is one commonplace invention that, to me, stands above them all, that has indeed transformed my life—and probably yours—and is my nomination as The Greatest Commonplace Invention of the Last 75 Years:

      The wheelie suitcase.

     Remember when we had to shlep big, heavy Samsonites and Amelia Earharts down endless airport corridors? Remember hauling them to the train station or the bus station or back home after a trip when it was freezing cold or blazing hot? Remember when our bags put the lug in luggage?

      Now we just roll them wherever we go, thanks to Bernard D. Sadow, the Thomas Edison of baggage.

Bernard Sadow’s patent for “rolling luggage.”

      In 1970, when he was a vice president of a Massachusetts company that made luggage and coats, Sadow was shlepping two heavy suitcases through an airport while returning from a family vacation. Waiting at customs, he recalled years later, he saw an airport worker rolling a heavy machine on a wheeled sled.

      It was his eureka moment.

      When he got back to work, he took casters off a wardrobe trunk and mounted them on a big travel suitcase. Then he put a strap on the front and was able to pull the suitcase behind him. In 1972, Sadow patented his invention as the Rolling Luggage.

      It was not, however, a perfect solution. The suitcases often tipped over or bumped into your ankles. Fifteen years after Sadow’s patent, a Northwestern Airlines pilot, Robert Plath, tired of regularly lugging clumsy bags through an airport, updated Sadow's design by rotating the suitcase so that the long side pointed up, attaching two wheels and building a retractable handle. He had inventing the Rollaboard.

Airline pilot Robert Plath with his Rollaboards.

      Our lives have never been the same.

      The other day, my wife and I, in our endless and mostly futile attempts at decluttering, excavated from the storage space under the stairs our cache of suitcases. We had, I am ashamed to admit, more than a dozen, of all sizes, colors and styles.

      We got rid of the three of them, bought in prehistoric times, that didn’t have wheels.